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While the Trump’s new “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity” met for the first time on Wednesday last week, People For the American Way (PFAW) and allies rallied outside of the meeting demanding that the commission respect the voting rights of all Americans. We protested and will continue to push back because, despite the commission’s “election integrity” branding, we know that it is just a thinly-veiled attempt to purge voter rolls nationally. During a panel streamed to Facebook Live, PFAW Foundation’s Christin “CiCi” Battle, director of Young People For (YP4), Peter Montgomery, senior fellow and writer for the PFAW’s Right Wing Watch blog, and Diallo Brooks, director of outreach and partner engagement, discussed the meeting, its mission, and what organizers can do. Watch it now:

During the panel, our experts also emphasized the historical implications of the commission, which already appears to be laying the groundwork for widespread voter suppression. From Brooks:

“Voter suppression is not a new tactic. Throughout American history, there’ve been various attacks on the ability of a lot of communities to vote. Women weren’t given the right to vote. African Americans weren’t allowed to vote. Different groups and different folks have been disenfranchised from the process for a long time. And throughout history even as gains were made, there were steps taken back. …

People have worked hard to do same-day voter registration, to open the polls up earlier, and to add more polling locations, but what we’ve seen recently is a limiting of polling places, and even a moving of polling places, and not telling communities; Those are government tactics for taking away the vote. There’s also been voter intimidation tactics. … So we have to do a lot of work to push back because … it’s not a new thing.”